Keiser Report: Happy Hacking! (ft. Richard Stallman) http://t.co/6CwlPLPex1 #Facebook #freesoftware #FSF

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-creator of UNIX operating system, had been curating some old DECtapes, and he offered some of the artifacts. Unfortunately existing tapes lack interesting things like earliest Unix OS source, but some indicative fossils have been prepared for exhibition.

"As described in the C History paper, 1972-73 were the truly formative years in the development of the C language: this is when the transition from typeless B to weakly typed C took place, mediated by the (Neanderthal?) NB language, of which no source seems to survive. It was also the period in which Unix was rewritten in C.

In looking over this material, I have mixed emotions; so much of this stuff is immature and not well-done, and there is an element of embarrassment about displaying it. But at the same time it does capture two moments in a period of creativeness and may have some historical interest.

Two tapes are present here; the first is labeled "last1120c", the second "prestruct-c". I know from distant memory what these names mean: the first is a saved copy of the compiler preserved just as we were abandoning the PDP-11/20, which did not have multiply or divide instructions, but instead a separate, optional unit that did these operations (and also shifts) by storing the operands into memory locations. [...]

"prestruct-c" is a copy of the compiler just before I started changing it to use structures itself.

It's a bit hard to get really accurate dates for these compilers, except that they are certainly 1972-73. There are date bits on the tape image, but they suffer from a possible off-by-a-year error because we changed epochs more than once during this era, and also because the files may have been copied or fiddled after they were the source for the compiler in contemporaneous use.

The earlier compiler does not know about structures at all: the string "struct" does not appear anywhere. The second tape has a compiler that does implement structures in a way that begins to approach their current meaning. Their declaration syntax seems to use () instead of {}, but . and -> for specifying members of a structure itself and members of a pointed-to structure are both there."

mortdeus, from Hacker News, has mirrored these files into a github repo where you can view these files.

Read more at Dennis Ritchie's original article.

Why #Microsoft is so involved in #OpenSource and #FreeSoftware? His founder says he has no use of money :))) - http://t.co/Bo55zGcCrc

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (78.31 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian packaging

I wanted to update publican to the latest upstream release but I stopped after a few hours of work during which I filed two bugs that a modicum of testing should have caught before release. So I decided to wait for the next minor release.

I uploaded python-django 1.4.4 and 1.4.5, new upstream maintenance and security releases which thus went into wheezy. I also prepared a stable update of Django (1.2.3-3+squeeze5) which required me to backport the last 2 sets of security patches.

I uploaded a new revision of wordpress to fix a problem with TinyMCE (#700289) and to update/add many translation files (#697208).

Bug reporting and misc fixes

Live-build issue. I experienced some intermittent failures when building HDD live images with live-build on armel. Daniel Baumann directed me to the problematic piece of code (the “oversizing” of the image size was not enough) so I committed a small fix by increasing the oversizing factor to 6%.

Live-config issue. I also reported another issue that I diagnosed in live-config (#701788), namely that the script which setups sudo was failing when the default user is root.

git-buildpackage issue. I filed #700411 after noticing that git-import-orig imported the debian directory provided by upstream. Those directories are not used with “3.0 (quilt)” source package and their presence in the upstream branch is thus harmful: any change to the upstream debian directory will result in conflicts when you merge a new upstream release in your packaging branch.

rubygems integration. Later I had to package a bunch of ruby applications that were using Bundler and I wanted to reuse as many packaged ruby modules that I could. But for this, those modules had to provide the required rubygems meta-information. I filed #700419 to request those on rake-compiler and with the help of Cédric Boutillier (and others on #debian-ruby), we identified a bunch of ruby modules which could get those with a simple recompilation. I filed bin-nmu requests in #700605.

Misc bugs. simple-cdd offers to select profiles to install but I noticed that the associated debconf template was not translated (#700915). The startup scripts (provided by initscripts) in charge of activating the swap are supposed to handle a “noswap” kernel command line option to disable swap. In #701301, I reported that the option was not working correctly if “quiet” was present first in the command line due to spurious “break” statements.

Debian France

Administrative work. We were late for some legal procedures so I wrote the report of the last general assembly and sent it to the “Tribunal d’instance of Sarreguemines” to record the changes in the administrative board. I also completed the “special register” of the association, it’s a notebook that is legally required and that must document any important change in the governance structure of the association (new members of the board, headquarters change, new bylaws, etc.).

Galette developments. Debian France is funding a few enhancements to the Galette free software that we’re using to manage the association. I am in touch with the Galette developer to answer his questions and ensure that his work will meet our needs.

Librement

I have been looking for talented developers who have a genuine interest in my Librement project. I want to fund the initial development of the project but I don’t have the means to fund it entirely. So I really wanted to find developers who would find an interest beside the money that I would pay.

I got in touch with the team of developers from Scopyleft and they look like very good candidates. But they’re heavy users of the Scrum development method and asked me to play the role of “product owner”. So I started to describe the project with “user stories” (i.e. “create the backlog” in the Scrum jargon), you can have a look at them here on trello.com. If you’re interested by the topic of free software funding, feel free to review and to send me your comments.

My goal is clearly to have a “minimal viable product” with the first iteration(s) that I fund and then use the platform itself to fund further developments of the project.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Un logiciel libre de gestion de restaurant ? ( @MaximeVenaud @maxauvy ) #FreeSoftware #Restauration

#Freedom on Buses, Computers and Everywhere http://t.co/IqvL5yyV8b #freesoftware #opensource

As folks know, I’ve been hacking on Firehose. I’ve been debating doing some work to modify / extend / replace DACA, and I could use some help writing new wrappers around static check code, so, who wants to hack?

Any UI folks? I could use a UI to view Firehose data, something spiffy and colorful.

Hackers? Send in some wrappers for your favorite static checking code. Send in pull requests or email me with a pointer to the repo :)

Hack on, folks!

I’ve downloaded all isos that I shall need this weekend: Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu (of course!). By different reasons I only could work last night but it isn’t matter, last night was Lubuntu Testing night! \o/

I’ve tested Lubuntu (amd64 – normal and alternate versions) And for my big surprise, Lubuntu isos worked too perfect I hope this day will be more productive and I can work on testing applications and Ubuntu testing as well.

Remember, if you want to be part of the UGJ, you will find information about testing procedures in our wiki pages, the official wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGlobalJam

And the Ubuntu QA team wiki page for UGJ:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Cadence/Raring/Week7UbuntuGlobalJam

If you use LVM with Wheezy on a solid-state drive, you really want to install the latest lvm2 update (i.e. 2.02.95-6, which contains the changes of -5). Otherwise, if you set issue_discards=1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf, you will experience severe data loss when using pvmove. Happened to me twice, once I didn't care (chroot data being lost), the second time (today) I did. Not fun, especially when the backup of the data was scheduled for the same day.

One has to wonder why it takes three months for a bug that trashes data to reach testing. (Obviously I know the answer, but they're not particularly good reasons.) Other distributions, like Ubuntu, were much quicker to notice and incorporate that fix. And in the case of the named distribution not because they auto-synced it from unstable. If somebody notices such a grave bug, please yell at people to get the fix out there to our users. Thanks.

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Recomiendo Angry Ip Scanner, Es un Escáner de Red corre en Linux, Windows, y Mac OS X aparte es #freesoftware http://t.co/UKzXHcLgLL